THE MOVEMENTS OF SOCIAL MEDIA. THE APPROPRIATIONS OF FACEBOOK IN THE STRATEGY OF THE APRIL 6TH YOUTH MOVEMENT IN EGYPT

(DRAFT)

Maria Garrido, PhDResearch Assistant ProfessorTechnology & Social Change Group, Information SchoolUniversity of Washingtonmigarrid@uw.edu

Luis Fernando BaronPhD CandidateInformation SchoolUniversity of Washingtonlfbaron@uw.edu

Norah AbokhodairPhD StudentInformation SchoolUniversity of Washingtonnoraha@uw.edu

Abstract

The non-violent demonstrations that toppled longstanding dictators in some countries in the Middle East has reignited interest among academics and activists about the role of youth and social media in advancing social change. Empowered with mobile phones, Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, and blogging platforms, young people in the region organized street protests, developed links of solidarity and support at home and abroad, engaged in political conversations, and carved spaces for youth to engage in street collective action. This study analyzes the role of social media, particularly Facebook, in the strategies of the April 6 th Youth Movement (A6YM) in Egypt during its emergence as a movement in late 2008. The Movement gathered its impetus from a Facebook group created by two activists - Ahmed Maher and Israa Abdel Fattah - to support the workers strikes in Mahalla in April 2008 transforming itself into one of the most important mobilizing forces behind the January 2011 protests that toppled the Mubarak regime. The analysis is mainly based on interviews with A6YM members and other key actors and qualitative coding of a sample of posts from March – December 2008 of the Movement’s Facebook page in Arabic. The authors used Meyer & Staggenborg’s four elements for assessing social movement strategy – demands, arenas, tactics, and targets – as theoretical framework to outline the different appropriation of Facebook into the strategy of the A6YM in its nascent phase. Findings point out that the appropriations of Facebook were not so strategic as mobilization force but rather as a “relative space of freedom” to individual expression; to engage people in political discussions and to build a sense of collective for youth. Those appropriations also had an important role in creating implicit bridges between youth and workers. The strategic importance of Facebook became more acute given the response of the State and media coverage. These findings challenge common held assumptions about leaderless nature of contemporary social movements and organic of collective action triggered by social media.

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Introduction

In the last three years the Middle East has witnessed profound transformations that are reshaping

the social and political fabrics of some countries in the region. To the Western eye, the idea that

people from different backgrounds joined forces and took the streets of Cairo, Tunis and other

cities demanding political freedoms, dignity and social justice and succeeding in removing

entrenched authoritarian regimes appeared as in impossibility a few years back (Bayat, 2011;

Bayat 2007). The perception of societies in the Arab world as politically apathetic, complacent

and incapable of engendering social forces powerful enough to incite political reforms were

shattered by the revolutions in Tunisia and Egypt in 2011 that culminated with the demise of

their dictatorial regimes placing tech-savy youth at the core of this political transformation.

In the case of Egypt, the success of the revolution was clearly not the result of few weeks of

protests but rather the confluence of different actors and social movement organizations

coordinating, simmering, shaping and reshaping “narratives of resistance” (Bennett, 2003) that

joined forces prior, during, and after January 25th 2011- the day that marked the beginning of the

ongoing process of democratic transformation in the country.

One of the most prominent actors behind the protests of early 2011was the April 6th Youth

Movement. A Movement that emerged from a Facebook Group created by two activists in Egypt

to support the workers strikes in the industrial city of Mahalla in April 2008. It evolved into a

broad social movement, providing a powerful narrative for social struggle in Egypt as well as

developing innovative strategies for collective action and mobilization of youth in the country.

During its trajectory, the movement garnered a wide level of support that crystallized around the

January 2011 protests and culminated with the overthrown of the Mubarak regime.

Facebook not only became a signature, a sign of recognition, to A6YM and its members, it also

became one of the core tools/symbols/venues that A6YM used and adapted in order to 1) create

alternative spaces and forms of communication with youth population, with other social and

political organizations, with the State institutions and with media; 2) to inform on current

sociopolitical issues and to coordinate activities and protests, and 3) specially to support a social

space for youth to express, interact, dialogue and organize by themselves. That said it is

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important to keep in mind that Facebook was also very well integrated and combined not only

with other social and traditional media, but also with other forms of information and

communication.

Current discussions on the influence of social media (SM) during recent protests such as the

Egyptian Arab Spring, have mainly focused on two visions. The first one highlights the intrinsic

power of technologies and the potentiality of SM as a democratizing tool for social change

(i.e.Castells, 2012; Shirky, 2008). The second, and less optimistic version of the mobilizing

power of these technologies, challenges the celebratory discourse of SM as a tool for collective

action and democratization (i.e. Gerbaudo, 2012) highlighting instead the importance of strong

ties among activists and social networks that not only able to risk their life and integrity, but also

are the ones who can apply their knowledge and available resources in attempting to generate

social changes and political transformations (Morozov, 2011).

Two underlying assumptions seem to permeate most of this emerging research. First and

foremost, techno-centric visions to the study of contemporary social movements describe them

as “leaderless, horizontal aggregates marking a historical shift from the pyramidal structures

characteristic of bureaucratic organizations.” (Castells; 2000 in Gerbaudo; 2012:22). Second; the

SM as mobilizing tools are treated, for the most part, in undifferentiated ways neglecting to

highlight the distinct technological features that allow for certain uses and appropriations in

different socio-political contexts but not others.

The vast majority of research analyzing the roles of SM during the Egyptian mobilizations of

2011, in general, tends to share the idea that SM has positive impacts on the ongoing political

transformations in the country and infers that these tools have actively contributed to the

strengthening of democracy and the public sphere in the country. Emerging findings point to the

positive role of SM in promoting the political engagement of individuals and social groups, as

tools for instrumental and operational mobilization of different activist groups, and the impacts

of these technologies in the diffusion of information in terms of their relationship with mass

media (i.e. (Hamdy & Gomaa, 2012; Miladi, 2012; Mohamed, 2012)

This paper analyses the relationships between the uses of Facebook and the strategies that A6YM

developed during its trajectory as a social movement organization. In doing this we seek to better

understand whether the uses that FB had within the movement were supporting other

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mobilization strategies or these roles could be considered as mobilization strategies by

themselves, or they were a mix of both. The analysis covers the trajectory of the Movement from

its inception as Facebook Group in March 2008 to the formation of the nascent movement in

June of the same year. This represents a preliminary analytical endeavor, considering that

between 2008 and 2011 we have characterized five main phases in the trajectory of A6YM,

which are also related to different appropriations and roles of Facebook, as non-organic, non-

fixed, sociotechnical platform. The phases we characterized are the result of an analytical

exercise. They neither correspond with a chronological development of events experienced by

A6YM nor do they provide a type of causality between one event and another. Instead they

helped us to identify relationships and cycles experienced by the movement and helped us to

better observe the different relations between Facebook and the movement strategies.

2. The April 6th Youth Movement: Carving space for youth collective action in Egypt

The April 6th Youth Movement is an Egyptian political opposition movement created youth

activists and established in 2008. It appeared in the political arena after the general strike, which

Egypt witnessed on April 6th, 2008, called for by Mahalla workers, supported by the political

forces and adopted by young people such as Israa Abdel Fattah and Ahmed Maher who began

co-promoting it as a Facebook event (later on a Facebook Group) of “General Strike for the

People of Egypt.” Most of the movement’s members are young people who do not belong to a

particular political parties or political stream. The movement has been rather keen not to adopt a

particular ideology in order to preserve the ideological diversity, in light of Egypt’s current

conditions that require a need for union, coalition and the rejection of disputes. April 6 Youth

Movement was among the first in calling for protests on Police Day on January 25 th 2011,as it

had done so the two years before, 2009 and 2010.

“….we wanted to protest because we considered them thugs who beat us up and torture us and now we’ll celebrate them and even have a national holiday? (…) But in 2009 it was very limited protest. In 2010 somewhat more. So in December 2010, [for January 25th 2011] we started an event called “Baltageya Day” (Thugs Day).” (Maher, 2012).

April 6th 2008, not only represents the date that marked the geneses of the April 6 Youth

Movement, but also a key moment within the sociopolitical process of the so called Egyptian

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revolution, which had a peak during the first months of 2011 triggering Mubarak’s resignation.

The strike of April 6, 2008 was part of a series of protests promoted by workers' organizations,

which had a significant increase since late 2005. The Mahalla strikes in particular were widely

regarded as precipitating a resurgence of the labor movement. According to versions of

opposition parties, during 2006 and 2007 Egypt experienced more than 1200 strikes nationwide.1

The Mahalla workers’ mobilization was also part of resurgence of political protest which has its

recent roots in solidarity committees that spread throughout Egypt following the start of the

Second Intifada in Palestine in October 2000 (Bayat, 2007). The pro-Intifada demonstrations

were particularly notable as they involved a new generation of previously non-politicized youth

and, as a direct consequence, resulted in a revival of Egyptian street politics. These political

protests also provided impetus for collective actions like Kefaya movement (Kifaya, meaning

“enough”), which achieved a much greater profile during the 2005 constitutional referendum and

presidential election campaigns.

According to (Bayat, 2007) only late 2004 there were signs of an embryonic and fragmented

movement seem to surface in Egypt. This process is described as a “new dawn” in the nation’s

political life; it was reflected in the simultaneous constellation of several social developments.

The formation of Kefaya represents for Bayat one of these developments because it placed

democratic transformation at the top of its agenda. In addition the novelty of Kefaya was that it

chose to work with popular forces, it brought the campaign into the streets and it concentrate

primarily on domestic concerns rather than nationalistic demands. Bayat also asserts that Kefaya

developed a new style of communication, organizational flexibility and mobilization, which

included the launch of a web site and mailing lists, charity drives, organized boycotts of

American and Israeli products, street actions, and the collection of signatures on petitions to

close down the Israeli Embassy in Cairo. (Bayat, 2007)

Garrido et al. (in progress) identified five distinct, although overlapping phases, in the trajectory

of the April 6th Youth Movement from March 2008 to April 2011:

Phase 1: Public Appearance as a Facebook Group

1 Abdel-Ghaffar Shokr, a prominent leader of the leftist Tagammu Party, highlighted the surge in the number of strikes since the end of 2005. In 2006, he counts no more than 200 strikes nationwide. "Yet in 2007, 1,000 strikes took place," he asserts. Al Ahram 8 - 14 May 2008 Issue No. 896.

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During the Spring of 2008, Egyptian workers and other opposition groups and movements such

as the Labor Party, the Karama Party, the Ghad Party and the Whad Party and the Kefaya

movement called for a national strike on April 6th at Ghazl Al-Mahalla textile factory. This call

sprung out of municipal elections and the increasing social protests marked by the “bread crisis”

(the price upsurges in essential foodstuffs) (El-Fiqi, 2008), and demonstration for raising wages.

In March 2008, Israa Abdel-Fattah and Ahmed Maher set up the “April 6th Strike Group” on

Facebook, inviting friends to support the workers strike and calling for a nationwide campaign of

civil disobedience. They also included political appeals calling for people to protest “bad

government” and “lack of human rights”.

The outcome was unexpected: more than 70,000 people joined the group and committed to either

express themselves or stay away from work on April 6th. (Abdel Fattah, 2011; Carr, 2008b;

Singer, 2008). The protests of April 6th became a hallmark of social mobilization and an

expression of the resurgence of the labor movement (Carr, 2008a, 2008c). Both Israa Abdel-

Fattah and Ahmed Maher were imprisoned and tortured by security forces as a result of their

“April 6th Strike Group” initiative, which exemplified an increasing awareness of the state

institutions on the power of Internet-based technologies -- especially Facebook -- for

mobilization. April 6th activists capitalized on the date, which they used not only to be socially

recognized but also to insist on the need of sustained social protest. However the power of social

media were overestimated when youth activists, including ‘the Facebook group', tried to

organized another national strike on May 4, 2008 -- Hosni Mubarak's 80th birthday- , which

resulted in a failure.

Phase 2: The creation of a Movement

Despite growing repression measures and constant threats against opposition groups that

Mubarak regime adopted, the youth collective was determined to transform their Facebook group

into a political movement (El-Sayed, 2008) and to involve more young people and organizations

through symbolic expressions of social discontent in key places and moments. According to

Maher (2012), the movement was established in June and they announced it on June 28, 2008.

On July 23 of this year, a national holiday commemorating the 1952 revolution, the group

launched a demonstration in Alexandria in protest at the arrest of some of their  compatriots.

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Fourteen members of the group were arrested and detained for more than 15 days.2 At the time

of their arrest they were singing nationalist songs and waving Egyptian flags, one of which was

attached to a kite. They were also wearing white t-shirts bearing the words of the April 6

Movement.3

Phase 3: Comparing notes: Strengthening the nascent movement

The protests and social discontent with the regime grew during this time (Carr, 2008a; Reem

2008), and A6YM built an important spot within the Egyptian socio-political scenarios. The

movement also became the target of pressure and persecution by the state institutions (Singer &

Samaan, 2008). During this time A6YM members studied on nonviolent tactics of protest,

especially from Serbian youth movements such as OTPOR (Resistance in English), that they had

regular communication and received training as well.4 In December 2008, one member of A6YM

took part in a US State Department organized "Alliance of Youth Movements Summit" in New

York City, where they also learned techniques to evade government surveillance and

harassment..5

The A6YM became an important bridge between different social organizations. In April 6 2009,

as a commemoration of the national protest of 2008, a group of social organizations gathered at

the headquarters of Al Karama party to initiate a New Egyptian Coalition for Change. They

wrote a manifesto focused on a broad range of national grievances:6 "We want decent wages,

education for our kids, a humane transport system, a functional health system, medicine for our

children, a functional and independent judiciary, safety and security. We want freedom and

dignity, and housing for the newly-weds. We don't want price increases, we don't want to be

2 See article: Face-off with Facebook Mohamed El-Sayed, Al Ahram, 31 July - 6 August 2008 Issue No. 9083 See for example the report of Michaela Singer and Magdy Samaan in July 24, 2008, Daily News Egypt.4 Eric Walberg asserts that “Determined to build on their networking success, writes Tina Rosenberg in Foreign Policy magazine, Mohamed Adel, a 20-year-old blogger and 6 April activist, went to Belgrade in 2009 and took a week-long course in the strategies of nonviolent revolution with Otpor…” Al Ahram 3 - 9 March 2011 Issue No. 1037.5 See more at: http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/pages/frontline/revolution-in-cairo/inside-april6-movement/#16 Joining the new group were novelists Sonallah Ibrahim and Alaa Al Aswany, head of the freedoms committee at the Journalists Syndicate Mohamed Abdel Quddous, actor and activist Abdel Aziz Makhiyoon and member of the Kefaya Movement for Change Abdel-Halim Qandil. Daily News Egypt, April 6, 2009.

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tortured in police stations, we don't want corruption, bribery detentions and manipulation of the

judiciary," it read.7

Phase 4: Widening networks – A movement matures

At this stage the activity of the A6YM as well as the narratives of media reflect state of

frustration with the results of protests and mobilizations in Egypt. Society, in general, and youth

population, in particular, did not expect social or political changes in Egypt, as it was pointed

out by the Egypt Human Development Report (EHDR), the majority of youth saw political

activities as useless and incapable of making a difference to their most immediate problems(El-

Bey, 2010). During this period the state of emergency was renewed for two more years on May

11, 2010. These facts motivated many expressions of dissatisfaction and cultivated the

sociopolitical arena to develop and strengthen alliances among oppositional social movements

and organizations.

However, the torture and later death of Khaled Saeed by the hands of Egyptian policemen

catalyzed a new momentum for social protests and greater public concern of Egypt’s political

situation. After Saeed’s assassination, two Facebook pages (one in Arabic and one in English),

created by activists, gathered an estimated 200,000 supporters in a couple of weeks.8 The case

not only provided a new impetus to the youth movements (Elyan, 2010), it also triggered new

claims of human-rights violations from organizations such as Amnesty International and new

calls from the U.S. government and the European Union urging democratic reforms in Egypt

(Baron, 2012).

Phase 5: A revolutionary Force (2011)

After the Parliamentary Elections of December 2010, a group of youth organizations and

activists, including the April 6Th Youth Movement (A6YM), started a process of convergence

in order to organize a national protest during Police Day on January 25, 2011, (El Kholy, 2011;

Maher, 2012). The groups also included We Are All Khaled Said (WAAKS), the Youth of

Justice and Freedom, the youth members of the Muslim Brotherhood, the Independent Campaign

for supporting AlBaradei, the AlGabha Party (the Front Party), the Kefaya Movement and some 7 See: Seasons of protest 2008: When demonstrations and strikes became the norm. Al Ahram 1 - 6 January 2009, Issue No. 928.8 This was the data provided within two articles of the Daily News Egypt on June 20, 2010.

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Independents, to mention a few. They organized to protest against police brutality, the

Emergency Law, the dismissal of the Minister of Interior, and the inheritance scenario of Gamal

Mubarak, a son of Hosni Mubarak (Kholy, 2011).

However, three main events altered the planned protest on Police Day in 2011: (1) The

increasing discontent among the population generated by the fraudulent results of the second

round of Parliamentary Elections on December 5 (2) The events of the car bombing during a

New Year's Eve service at the al-Qiddissin Church; and (3) The Tunisian revolution as a result of

a wave of social and political unrest and civil disobedience that led to the ousting of President

Zine El Abidine Ben Ali on January 14, 2011, after 23 years in power (Tisdall 2011).

The protests on January 25th triggered an exponential, but unexpected, dynamic of national

protests, which were conducive to the “March of Millions” on January 28th and which ended

with the occupation of Tahrir Square and many other squares by millions of protesters around

Egypt. These events, in turn, produced Mubarak’s resignation and the Supreme Council of the

Armed Forces (SCAF) taking the reins of power in Egypt on February 11th 2011.

3. The strategy of social movements from a theoretical perspective (TO BE REVISED IN NEXT VERSION)

Borrowing from Meyer and Staggenborg (2012), for the purposes of this paper we understand

that social movements’ strategies are result of the intersection of structure and agency “as

activists seek to respond to changing political and cultural circumstances and maximize their

impact” (Meyer & Staggenborg, 2012, p. 4). They also argue that strategic decisions are

constrained and influenced by a web of relations formed over time, and the choices that activists

made about claims, issues, allies, frames, identity and resources and tactics. These authors

propose three major elements of strategic decision making: “the demands or claims made by

collective actors; the arenas or venues of collective action; and the tactics or forms of collective

action. All these choices imply the selection of particular targets or collective action.” (Meyer &

Staggenborg, 2012, p. 5)

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One of the most interesting contributions of Meyer and Staggenborg (2012) is that they offer an

operational way of thinking about strategic choices, comprising the visible expression of

decisions about claims, venues, and tactics. By thinking about strategy as multiple decisions by

multiple actors, and by using different levels of analysis, it could be argued that it is possible to

trace the range of factors affecting the expression of strategic choices made by social movement

organizations and their consequences.

This approach builds up from Tilly’s conceptualization of the repertoires of collective actions, as

forms of actions in which “people act together in pursuit of shared interest” (Tilly 1995: 41).

Tilly understands the repertoires of of collective action as forms of action (means of action)

which are effectively available to a given set of people in the context of their time. These forms

of actions have two characteristics: 1) they are learned, understood, sometimes planned and

rehearsed by participants, and 2) people have only few of these means at their disposal.

However, the repertoire of collective action “typically leaves plenty of room for improvisation,

innovation, and unexpected endings.” (Tilly, 1984, p. 307)

To better understand the utility of Tilly’s conceptualization of repertoires, it is important to

consider that in his own scholar trajectory he understands, on one hand, social movements as an

historical –and not as an universal- category “as a sustained campaign of claim making, using

repeated performances that advertise the claim, based on organizations, networks, traditions, and

solidarities that sustain these activities. (Tilly & Tarrow, 2007, p. 8). On the other hand, he

understands that “Identities belong to that potent set of social arrangements in which people

construct shared stories about who they are, how they are connected, and what has happened to

them… Whatever their truth or falsehood by the standards of historical research, such stories

play and indispensable part in the sealing of agreements and the coordination of social

interaction. Stories and identities intersect when people start deploying shared answers to the

questions “Who are you?” “Who are we?” and “Who are they?” (Tilly, 2005, p. 209)

This research also considers the questions raised by Tilly a decade ago on the ways in which

social movement activists have integrated new technologies into their organizing and into their

very claim making performances, such as: “Are new technologies transforming social

movements? In what ways? If so, how do they produce their effects? How do new tactics and

new forms of organization interact in 21st century social movements? More generally, to what

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extent and how do recent alterations in social movements result from the changes in international

connectedness that people loosely call globalization?” (Tilly, 2003, p. 1).

4. Methodology

This paper is based on a qualitative content analysis of the April 6th Youth Movement Facebook

Group and Page in Arabic from March to December 2008 and interviews with members of the

movement, including two of its founders, and other key actors in the country. A sample of

approximately 100 Facebook posts was included in the analysis for this period of time.

In order to collect Facebook posts, we developed an application using the Facebook Graph

application programming interface (API), which is a way for developers to access Facebook data

and build applications. At the time of data collection, Facebook format did not enable users to

browse through old posts without crashing the browser.

This paper is part of a larger study on the changing roles of Facebook in prodemocracy

movements in Egypt that comprises a qualitative content analysis of multiple sources that

include Facebook pages, blogs in Arabic and English, Egyptian and international newspapers,

regional news media, as well as in-depth interviews with political actors, journalists, and A6YM

members.

5. Preliminary Findings

During the first months of 2008 different civil society forces, especially led by youth members of

organizations such as Kefaya, the Ghad Party and the Whad Party, built up on the workers

strikes, in particular the one developed in the industrial city of Mahalla to link economic and

political issues as well as to call for a national mobilization. That call resulted in one of the

largest popular uprising of its kind in Egypt since the January 1977 riots over threats by the

government to reduce bread subsidies.9 A Facebook Group created by two young activists had an

important role during those protests, and, as we will explain later, Facebook became an

alternative sociopolitical arena for collective action.

9 See for example: April 6 strike kicks off a year of protests Daily News 12/23/2008

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On march 23 2008 Israa Abdel-Fattah and Ahmed Maher, set up the “April 6th Strike Group” on

Facebook inviting friends to support a workers strike at Ghazl Al-Mahalla textile factory and

calling for a nationwide campaign of civil disobedience to highlight the deteriorating conditions

faced by the majority of Egyptians. The outcome was unexpected: soon after they disseminated

the call for strike on Facebook they initiated an interesting political discussion and gathered over

70.000 members of the group committed to express themselves or staying away from work on

April 6th. The extent to which the commitment of people supporting the call on Facebook

materialized on the actual date of the strike it is difficult to determine. However, what is critical

for the analysis regarding the strategic importance of Facebook during the early stages of the

April 6th Youth Movement.

According to the data analyzed, the initiative of the national mobilization was the result of, on

one hand, the continued support and solidarity offered to workers movement by oppositional

organizations, especially by youth groups and youth cadres of the organizations mentioned

above. On the other hand, it was the result of an intense and an effective use by these groups of

a combination of different information & communication technologies - mainly blogs, emails,

videos, text messages and later on Facebook - and traditional means such as leaflets who

withdrew from the streets due to intensified security pressure from the Mubarak regime after

2006 and used online spaces to voice their dissent. This was produced by a continue process of

protests' criminalization and persecution of oppositional activists the Mubarak’s regime. As

Ahmed Maher (personal communication, 2011) explains:

“In 2005, there was enormous international pressure for democratization put on Mubarak but in 2006 that pressure was taken off. Mubarak pressured us [activists] continuously and banned any street protests. This cause a withdrawal from the streets due to the security apparatus pressure and everything became “internet activism”. Everyone was blogging, videotaping, everyone had a camera YouTube and such. But streets protests became really scarce, they became really dangerous.” (Translated from Arabic by Marwa Maziad)

From the strategic perspective of the activists behind the April 6th Facebook Group, the call for

support to the Mahalla workers through a national general strike seems that had four

simultaneous goals: 1) To strengthen the legality and legitimacy of social protests; 2) to show

authorities social discontent with the general situation in Egypt; 3) Build bridges of solidarity

and awareness between youth and the workers 4)Provide youth with the opportunity to position

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themselves as sociopolitical actor. The demands and claims of this mobilization strategic was

focus primarily on the socioeconomic situation (food subsides, health, education, jobs) but

included also subtle political appeals calling for people to protest “bad government” and “lack of

human rights”. The most important arenas of collective action at the time were the factories and

streets, and the sociotechnical space created on the Facebook Group which was implemented as

another social venue of collective action, as a “relative space of freedom” (Bayat, 2007) for

expression and political discussion, especially among young people that did not have to be part

of the FB Group or connected to Internet (this because of the existence of other social networks

as well as the use of other forms of communication such as flyers or graffiti). The main tactics

that the organizers implemented were: to provide information; to express solidarity; to generate

spaces of discussion; to stay at home (or close their business). In particular, the administrators of

the Facebook Group tried to avoid the use of words such as strike (in Arabic) and movement (in

Arabic) ought to the resistances and stigmas of several social sectors over these words and to

make the call for strike more appealing (or less threatening) to different audiences.

During these early stages of the Movement’s formation, Facebook was one among many

communication channels through which the activists sought the mobilize support for the Mahalla

workers strike. Its strategic importance grew in part by the unexpected response of thousands of

Facebook users who became members of the Facebook Group, the reaction of the Egyptian state

against its administrators, two of whom were jailed shortly after the Mahalla strike, and the

coverage of mass media in the country which labeled this amorphous group of young activists as

“Facebook youth” or “Facebook April 6th youth”. This confluence of events propelled both

youth as a sociopolitical force and Facebook as a space of contention to the national scene and

gave impetus to the nascent April 6th Youth Movement.

Tarek El Kholy (personal communication, 2011), media spokesperson of April 6 th Movement

adds that the state intervention, warning the people against going on strike actually backfired and

spread the idea more. “Demonstrations started to come out”. On April 5th, the night before the

day of strike, anchor Tamer Amin of the highly viewed “Al Bait Baitak” talk show running on

state TV read a statement from the Ministry of Interior saying that “those who will not go to

work will be subjected to very harsh punishments.” This kind of propaganda by the Ministry of

Interior warning against the strike “made people wondered: Is there a strike?! A lot of them

looked on the Internet and found the Facebook event. And so they joined the Facebook group!

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It is quite significant to note how the actors describe why more people joined the Facebook

group, attributing it to the mechanism of “finding it online” based on State TV’s very warning

against striking. So it is almost a catch 22. Those who didn’t know about the invitation heard

about it on state TV and went to “check” and when they liked what they saw “they joined the

event”. That arguably made them more motivated to “give it a try and come out in

demonstrations” rather than ignore it. The magnitude of the success of April 6th demonstrations

on the street in Cairo or other governorates besides Mahalla might have been limited but the

“Ping-Pong,” action-reaction mechanism between the activists and the state became a

performance to be watched and vetted for by the depoliticized citizen.

In summary, in the early stages of the formation of the April 6th Youth Movement Facebook was

discovered/implemented as an alternative sociopolitical arena for expression and discussion,

especially for youth. Later on Facebook became a venue for building a sense of group (a sense of

us and a sense of others as well) for youth and then Facebook is used as both as operational

resource to recruit and implement key activities of the nascent movement as well as a sign (a

symbol) of identification of a new actor within the sociopolitical debate in Egypt.

This analysis will be developed further in the next version of the paper.

Conclusion: Youth, social media, and the democratic future of Egypt

More than two years after January 25th Revolution in 2011, Egypt seems to be on a perilous

path. Total “State Failure” does not seem an extreme scenario today, despite the initial optimism

for creating a new political and economic reality following the “People Demand The Fall of the

Regime” slogan. After parliamentary and presidential elections that brought Muslim

Brotherhood candidate Mohamed Morsi as President; after a new contested constitution and

subsequent series of judicial battles; after an end to the military transition period and despite

current calls by some for a new military coup, the political process in Egypt seems messier than

ever. The biggest current challenge to this democratic transition is that the Egyptian people are

left suspicious of what politicians can achieve on their behalf. The situation becomes ever

gloomier when we consider the economic menace, where foreign reserves are foreseen to be

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depleted within three months, despite aid from Qatar and Libya and negotiations for a $4.5

billion IMF loan.

In the midst of this, the “Revolutionary Youth” who have spearheaded the uprisings, are equally

untrusted in their capacity to lead. April 6th Youth Movement, the first to call for

demonstrations, has experienced internal splits and change of course. For example, the

“Democratic Front” of April 6th Youth Movement—which is not acknowledged by Ahmed

Maher, the co-Founder of the movement—has not been particularly supportive of the Muslim

Brotherhood presidential candidate, while Ahmed Maher’s Front has supported Mohamed Morsi

and has argued that April 6th has in fact tipped his chances for winning. Ahmed Maher was

initially part of the Constituent Assembly to have written the controversial constitution, ratified

in November 2012, after many liberals walked away from it deeming it too dominated by

“Islamists”, too favorable to the military institution, and too capitalistic and anti-workers rights.

Six months later however, due to the current clash between the ruling Muslim Brotherhood’s

Freedom and Justice Party, and diversified segments of society, April 6th Youth Movement is

critical of the President and Ahmed Maher himself has revised his position and alliance with the

Muslim Brotherhood and is now critical of their politics.

The situation in Egypt is currently very bleak. The most problematic aspect is the utter lack of

faith in the political process, given the way civilian politicians on all sides have been acting, in a

metaphor of attempting to “snatch” a piece of power, instead of succeeding in building a political

structure that sustains all of them and their constituents. This situation could very well pave the

way to another military coup—the way coups have taken place in Turkey’s history for example,

given similar conditions in Egypt of mistrust in the political process. The added risk however, in

the case of Egypt, is the seeming “generalized un-governability,” where neither the military, nor

the Muslim Brotherhood, nor the Liberals offer any practical solutions of Egypt’s dire economic,

political, and social problems. Looking at Egypt today, we are so far away from achieving any of

the Revolution’s slogans: “Bread, Freedom, Human Dignity, and Social Justice.” The real irony

is that there are voices comparing Mubarak’s times to today’s reality and wish they could undo

history, despite having supported the Revolution. The optimists compare the current situation in

Egypt to the French Revolution, with its episodes of tyranny and Reign of Terror and emphasize

the “process” nature of revolutions. Both pessimists and optimists, however, agree that things

will only have to get worse before they ever get better.

15

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